Wednesday, January 01, 2014

Steve Sailer: iSteve: My review of "The 10,000 Year Explosion"

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/02/my-review-of-10000-year-explosion.html


I'm pleased that a new book, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, demonstrates that Darwin has two worthy 21st Century successors of comparable insight and ambition: co-authors Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending. (They've set up an official website for The 10,000 Year Explosion here).

On the first page of The 10,000 Year Explosion, Cochran and Harpending quote the reigning conventional wisdom about humanity:
"There's been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we've built with the same body and brain."— Stephen Jay Gould
The co-authors then announce that they will undermine this standard presumption:
"We intend to make the case that human evolution has accelerated in the past 10,000 years, rather than slowing or stopping, and is now happening about 100 times faster than its long-term average over the 6 million years of our existence. The pace has been so rapid that humans have changed significantly in body and mind over recorded history. Sargon and Imhotep were different from you genetically as well as culturally."
As Greg quips, "The past may never be the same again."


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